The invading army carried selfie sticks, or maybe those were just their arms. At this point, aren’t all arms just selfie sticks anyhow?

Aren’t all arms just selfie sticks anyhow?

In Selfie Assault, an entry to the Ludum Dare 32 game jam,your army of one is armed only with a cellphone. You walk around a white pavilion trying to kill green boxes. Those boxes, in turn, can only be killed by being captured in a selfie. And not one of those cheating selfies that you can do with an iPhone’s second camera, either. In Selfie Assault, only an old-school selfie can kill the enemy. Selfie Assault offers no reason to kill the green boxes; like selfies, it’s just something that you do.

The main challenge in Selfie Assault should be familiar to any cellphone owner: How to navigate the world while looking at your phone? Sure, the game allows you to see the world through your phone’s camera, but that degree of mediation makes everything a bit harder. Moreover, as anyone who has ever stumbled into a fire hydrant can tell you, being able to see around the edges of your phone is of limited use.

If that wasn’t difficult enough, you can only kill boxes in Selfie Assault while the image on your phone is inverted. Trying to navigate through the gameworld, then, is an awful lot like reversing a semi truck. Selfie Assault is the challenge of phone ownership in 2015 with a bit of added cuboid murder. It’s a surprisingly winning combination.